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Overview

Rana (Clara Khoury) is a young Palestinian woman, living in Jerusalem. Her father (Zuher Fahoum) is moving to Egypt, and he knows that Rana does not want to go with him. He thinks she's too young to get married, but he gives her a choice; she can go with him, or she can marry one of the men on a list he's compiled of acceptable bachelors. On the morning of her father's departure, Rana sneaks out of the house and goes to meet Khalil (Khalifa Natour), the man she loves, as they had arranged. But a bombing the night before has kept Khalil from coming to Jerusalem, so Rana has to navigate a treacherous bureaucratic labyrinth of checkpoints and armed guards to reach Khalil at the theater where he works in Ramallah. When she finally gets there, her troubles are far from over. Her plan is for Khalil to marry her, but because she's underage, they find they need her father's permission. Together with Khalil's friend, Ramzy (Ismael Dabbag), the couple must drive back to Jerusalem, pick up the registrar to officiate, and convince her father to let her marry Khalil. As the deadline grows closer -- her father is taking an afternoon flight -- Rana ponders her decision to marry and to stay in Jerusalem, and wonders whether or not she's doing the right thing. Rana's Wedding was written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad, who also made the 2002 documentary Ford Transit. Both films were shown at the 2003 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, where Abu-Assad was awarded the Nestor Almendros Prize for courage in filmmaking.

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Editorial Reviews

Rana's Wedding is a trenchant film about Palestinian life under occupation, dealing with its subject effectively on an intimate human scale, but it occasionally strays into heavy-handedness. Writer/director Hany Abu-Assad, an experienced documentarian, makes excellent use of non-professional actors and his vibrant Jerusalem and Ramallah locations, giving a realistically gritty feel to his story. The story itself has a tried and true feel, as Rana (Clara Khoury) searches for Khalil (Khalifa Natour), the theater director she loves, racing the clock so she can marry him before her disapproving father (Zuher Fahoum) leaves for Egypt. But the specifics of the story give it added resonance. Rana faces her father's (and her society's) restrictive patriarchal attitudes (a theme which Abu-Assad deals with subtly and effectively), but she also deals with this crisis in a land where a cry of frustration directed at a cell phone is cause for a group of Israeli soldiers to train their guns on her, and where a hastily packed handbag, inadvertently left on a street corner for a few minutes, is quickly blown up by a bomb-destroying robot. In these brief scenes, the filmmaker makes his points about occupation wittily and efficiently, so it's a shame he feels it necessary to hammer home the point by having Rana state his case explicitly. At one point, Rana is dashing through a checkpoint where Israeli soldiers are shooting at rock-throwing Palestinian boys, and she actually stops to pick up a stone and throw it herself in a dangerous and completely unnecessary, not to mention unlikely, gesture. Rana's Wedding is a well-made and worthy film, but in dealing with such emotionally potent subject matter, Abu-Assad would have been better off presenting his story without overt politicizing and letting viewers draw their own conclusions.